Contributor Spotlight: Brandon Davis Jennings

A (Partial) Narrative Genesis for
“Bosnian Roulette”

Two years ago at AWP in D.C., Hugh
Martin and I (both veterans of the most recent Iraq war) attended a war writing
panel. After Brian Turner read from Here,
Bullet and Andrew Carroll read from Operation
Homecoming, the panel opened for questions. One reason I dislike/loathe
panels is that some people use post-panel Q&As to self-advertise, or ask
ridiculous questions: exempli gratia “Where do you write?” or “How did you think of (insert plot point/image
here)?” or “Did that really happen?”
I was ready to leave before any of the aforementioned occurred, but before I exited,
a man wearing a unit cap, T-shirt adorned with a bald eagle head, and BDU pants
stood. They handed him a microphone, and he said (This is not verbatim; I
wanted to forget it, but fortunately I haven’t.) “We need people to write the
truth. Not about baby killing. That. Didn’t. Happen. But the good stuff.” Hugh
and I looked at one another and laughed—not because the man’s statement was
humorous.

“That. Didn’t. Happen.” Has there
ever been a serious conflict in which no children were harmed? I’d have to define “children,” “a serious conflict,” and “harmed” in order to answer that question properly, and this is supposed to
be about the Who/What/When/Where/Why/How of my story (a couple Whys and a few
Whos at least). So in the interest of saving ink/e-ink I’ll leave those three
things undefined and move on to what it was about that man that caused my
neural receptors to soak up his words and start a chain reaction that ended in
my reflexive burst of laughter. I saw myself in that man, presumably a veteran since
he wore a unit cap and BDU pants (I’ve not worn BDUs since I was discharged
except as a Halloween costume), who had somehow found his way to AWP in D.C.,
and had then felt compelled to say “the baby killing” didn’t happen. What made that
man state this to a group of people that likely dismissed his statement as the
kind of thing that some “crazy old vet” (a la Christopher Meloni’s character in
Wet Hot American Summer) would say? I
don’t know. I didn’t talk to him, which is another one of the Whys of my story:
I want to understand why he said whathe
said because whatever compelled him to say “the baby killing” didn’t happen might
compel men/women to say similar things in the future.

Here’s a theory: Masculine
propagandists (hereafter referred to as ‘they’) want men/women to measure
themselves against an impossible standard. They want men/women to believe that
no “American fighting man” (scare quotes indicate antiquated phrasing) would
piss his/her pants in combat (or elsewhere), and that we (The United States
Armed Forces) always follow the UCMJ and the LOAC to the letter because we are
better than any other fighting men/women in the world. They want us to believe
we would never kill babies, not even on accident. They make men/women believe we
must be flawless, that we must be something that no man/woman can be.

Assuming that man was a Vietnam War
vet (and not a man who’d purchased BDU pants and a unit cap from an Army
Surplus store) what’s going to happen twenty/thirty/forty years from now if
American men/women don’t shift the expectations of what a fighting man/woman
should be? I won’t speculate on What Ifs, but Anthony Swofford wrote in a
recent article that (statistically) eighteen Iraq/Afghan veterans kill
themselves each day. I hope those who’ve killed themselves didn’t do so because
no one was willing to listen to them talk about what was bothering them; I’m
sure many chose not to talk because they believed real men don’t talk about
their problems. And so I wrote this story, in part, because I hope it might
persuade some men/women to talk instead of suffocating themselves in silence, and
I hope it will inspire some people to listen—even if those listeners don’t
agree with what’s being said. Because it’s not always about consensus;
sometimes being recognized is enough. I know if so many people hadn’t listened
to me, I might be in a terrible spot today. And I wish I hadn’t laughed at that
man. But I did, instinctively. And this story is the closest I can get to an
apology.

***

Brandon
Davis Jennings is an Iraq War veteran from West Virginia. He received his MFA
in Fiction from Bowling Green State University, and is currently a PhD in
English candidate at Western Michigan University. His work has appeared or is
forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry
Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review,Monkeybicycle, Ninth
Letter, Passages North. His chapbook Waiting for the Enemy is
the 2012 winner of Iron Horse Literary Reviews Single Author Chapbook
Competition. His story, “Bosnian Roulette,” appears in issue #50 of Hayden’s
Ferry Review.